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Ask HN: What kind of ideas are not VC-backable but should exist in the future?

• j45 6y ago
  Instead of trying to understand the VC lens, consider the customer lens and solve a problem they have for $. Any great solution that can be successful under 100M/y probably wouldn't be of interest to VCs, so there's a lot of opportunity out there.
  • quickthrower2 6y ago
    Drive thru McDonald’s franchise?
• shoo 6y ago
  how's this for a wild idea: humanity changes the objectives it prioritises to value long term environmental sustainability & to focus on benefits to society -- instead of prioritising things than benefit individuals & making decisions based primarily on economic growth or individual profit motive. (not only is that incompatible with VC funding, it's incompatible with capitalism & western style individualism, so arguably operating in such a fashion is unreachable from our current society, even if being able to operate in such a fashion would be superior from the perspective of the whole species)
  • allenleein 6y ago
    Love it
  • easytiger 6y ago
    Those things are also entirely subjective,as much as people like to claim scientific imperatives for socialist constructs the best tool towards those goals generally is regulated markets. Like we have now
    • adamc 6y ago
      There is a subjective element, but they are not ENTIRELY subjective. It's pretty clear that less pollution would make for a more sustainable environment... it's just more expensive. It's pretty clear that it would be safer (prudent) to cut back on carbon emissions... it just has negative economic effects.
      • blamestross 6y ago
        It's all about desired rate of return. Demanding short forces companies to leverage externalities like causing pollution to make money. Long term returns motivates you not to destroy the planet to achieve the goal. Really Long term returns hinge on the fact that converting the asteroid belt O'Neill cylinders is the future of mankind and destroying the planet to get there is fine as long as you get enough people off this rock first.
  • egypturnash 6y ago
    brb, making a dozen sock puppet accounts so I can give this all the upvotes it deserves :)
  • DoingIsLearning 6y ago
    You mind find Kate Raworth's proposal interesting - 'doughnut economics': https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/ https://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut/ Amsterdam's cityhall (NL) is piloting an implementation, so perhaps there is hope that it can go beyond a theoretical framework proposal.
• muzani 6y ago
  There's plenty of smaller problems that are not VC backable. VCs need you to be a billion dollar company. A lot of smaller markets exist. For example, I did a keto recipe app for Malay food. Malay food is different to the usual keto recipes; with rice based food, you can't simply replace everything with cauliflower. The market was about 200k people, too small for VCs but it was in high demand for the target market. People just kept asking to buy more. We only pulled out of the market because it was (literally) toxic and cultlike. But similar problems exist. Primal diet for Japanese food maybe. Job boards for part timers and teenagers. A better language learning app, maybe for something very specific like Latin. Take an existing market and hyperfocus it.
  • qwerty456127 6y ago
    How do you fund this kind of projects then?
    • exdsq 6y ago
      Business loans, personal investment, bootstrap, profits, etc. How every other company in the world has to get funding :P
    • muzani 6y ago
      VCs were skeptical, partly because it did not fit their concept of a tech company. Government were uninterested because it sounded like a food company at its core masquerading as a tech company; we were more like a recipe app that directed ads internally. At the time, the buzz was that Uber, Airbnb, Alibaba held no stock, and nobody wanted to invest in companies that needed a warehouse, even though everyone wanted to invest in e-commerce. Banks actually called us up and asked us if we wanted to borrow money because we had steady revenue. Our delivery and food supply partners were actually interested in being early stage investors, so there's that route. We started with about $2500, most of it going into salary. Suppliers were happy to send the stuff direct to customers when we started and let us pay them the money due once a month, at a smaller profit margin. As we started selling more, we'd keep a literal ton of stock on hand.
  • neilk 6y ago
• simonebrunozzi 6y ago
  Cities of the future. Here's my 1-minute pitch [0]: Cities are inefficient, expensive and unsustainable. We could build cities in a better way. Ten times better. But why it’s not happening? $COMPANY will allow millions of people to pool money, resources and great design to build better cities. Our first milestone, or Tesla Roadster, will be to collect 100 million dollars in pre-orders for the first $COMPANY village. Builders, home buyers, and a 10x great design, as if you were building a city on Mars. And maybe Elon Musk will like to help us too! Eventually we will build entire cities from scratch, to make housing affordable and clean for everyone. I tried to build something like this already once, and failed, but I really want to make this happen, and I want you to believe in me. So, let' talk! [0]: https://youtu.be/GtMybYBGCwc https://youtu.be/GtMybYBGCwc (please don't share this video elsewhere for now, if you can be so kind) Edit: I will soon apply to Apollo [1] with this. Suggestions are welcome :) [1]: https://apolloprojects.com/ https://apolloprojects.com/
  • arthurcolle 6y ago
    How does this make money?
    • ryanSrich 6y ago
      It doesn't. Thus not VC-backable. But it should exist.
      • simonebrunozzi 6y ago
        Why not? Forgive a bit of optimism (and maybe arrogance): imagine AirBnB, making a cut on transactions between hosts and guests. This specific company could make a cut acting like a marketplace between builders and homebuyers. Defensible? Not sure. Still many things to figure out.
        • arthurcolle 6y ago
          So... like taxes? So I'm paying taxes to the government, and then fees to some business, on top of fees for every service provided by the business? We already tried company towns (look up Disney, among many other examples), and it's kind of fucked up. I don't think we need more of that. Yeah, no thanks. Good luck with the idea EDIT: btw, your site www.brunozzi.com is down. You might want to figure out CDNs before you try to disrupt cities
• williamsmj 6y ago
  How about a product that doesn't grow by accretion with the goal of acquiring new users or upselling existing users, but rather changes rarely and only in ways that benefit users? The growth imperative required by VC funding is directly or indirectly to blame for all the awful things about Dropbox mentioned in https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/ https://tonsky.me/blog/syncthing/. It's difficult to see how a product like Syncthing would be of interest to VCs.
  • mlthoughts2018 6y ago
    That linked article is actually kind of crap. Contrasting the workflow of downloading Syncthing binary and just executing it vs Dropbox sign up, install & download is a false dichotomy. Nobody who wants to deal with shell level management of a running program that also needs to communicate with other nodes is part of the target user market for Dropbox, totally different worlds, different feature sets, everything.
    • ponker 6y ago
      Yeah it’s like Picasso saying “You bought that Thomas Kinkade piece of crap? I could have a bought a brush for $3 and painted something better in just a few weeks!”
• bravura 6y ago
  Most open-source, as well as most scientific work that gets published. [edit: But these aren't sustainable businesses, necessarily, if that's what you're asking.]
• threeseed 6y ago
  VC are middlemen. Their job is to funnel money from their upstream investors e.g. hedge funds, superannuation etc into startups that they believe will make money. The timeframe for this process is basically a decade. So a startup has a decade to take money, do something and then return the money. It's why startups are being held to the T2D3 growth benchmark. They need things wrapped up pretty quick. So if you are a startup wanting to build a long term business then the VC track probably isn't for you unless you are willing to either (a) get acquired or (b) IPO. There really does need to be more revenue sharing VC options as this is the only way to support the type of long term, sustainable businesses we really need.
  • simonebrunozzi 6y ago
    Not necessarily (although you are kind of right to a good extent). There are other types of investors that will happily take the 10-year old investment and ride with it for another number of years. Usually they do it by discounting the value, and thus making money that way. (not good for founders, employees, or early investors other than VCs with good clauses in their investment contracts).
• jppope 6y ago
  Venture Capital has a sweet spot where they focus on Capital-intense (obvious) products, preferably software. (Check out this video: https://youtu.be/vErPgQF3N38 https://youtu.be/vErPgQF3N38) Many National Defense projects won't work for VC for a variety of reasons. Some can, but security clearance and regulations usually scare VCs away. Many service based companies... not because they can't (strictly speaking) but VC has a system in place that doesn't gel well with service based approaches. Anything that would take a long time to grow won't attract VC funds either.
• GoodJokes 6y ago
  What if we just get rid of VC-backable. Why does something need to be VC-backable to exist. That is kinda messed up.
• colordrops 6y ago
  A new container system that gets rid of all waste - Design and manufacture a set of a few dozen or hundred re-usable containers of different shapes and sizes, and a system for printing environmentally friendly ink on them that can be easily removed. Start a department/grocery store that does not use any disposable packaging. Give tax incentives to companies that use this packaging. The printable labels would allow for market differentiation since package types are now standard. Trucks come around and pick up the empty containers from customers, or they can bring them back to the store.
  • peachy_no_pie 6y ago
    Sounds like living packets. https://livingpackets.com/ https://livingpackets.com/
    • colordrops 6y ago
      This is a bit different but it looks like a step in the right direction.
    • totetsu 6y ago
      This looks like it belongs in a video game.
  • wesammikhail 6y ago
    This is one of the most important problems to solve hands down. And not just for environmental reasons. I live alone and produce mountains of waste even though I consume very little. Every item I buy comes wrapped in unneccessary amounts of plastic. By the end of each week I have bags full of waste that shouldnt be there. I dunno how to solve for this but it´s seriously mind boggling how much waste is produced that has no reason for being there.
    • minerjoe 6y ago
      The only way to win is to not play. Seriously, did you truly "need" everything you purchased new and could you have gotten it second hand or forgone? I already hear grumbling from the crowd, "opportuniy cost", "time", "but shiny!", etc. That is the trade off for not feeding a system energy that is demostrably destroying everything of true value on this planet. It's worth it.
• henning 6y ago
  Most businesses don't make sense for VC because they can't grow at the rate VC needs in order to work or reach the size. Pick any large industry and look at the software used. It is probably not great (there is a difference between old software that works or works well enough and badly designed software that does not do its job well). Within that lies what is actually interesting, which is customer pain, and potential customers who will pay to have that solved.
• aresant 6y ago
  A company that picks up, breaks down, and recycles Amazon boxes once a week for $49.95 a month.
  • codingdave 6y ago
    Many municipalities and waste management companies already have recycling programs along with their trash pickup service.
  • conductr 6y ago
    I doubt that price point would work. But I do miss daily door side trash pick up from when I was an apartment dweller. I’d pay $50 for that.
• forgotmypw17 6y ago
  Protected wild areas where no synthetic chemicals, lasers, nanoware, etc. are allowed.
  • mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
    Like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Wilderness_Preservation_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Wilderness_Preservati...
    • forgotmypw17 6y ago
      Yes, but for human habitation
• Jemaclus 6y ago
  Alternative battery systems for hearing aids. Most of the size of the more powerful hearing aids are due to battery size. If the hearing aid battery could be miniaturized further or even completely eliminated (by, say, running off body heat or something), then hearing aids would shrink to be invisible. The advent of Bluetooth has made it normal to have things hanging out of your ears, but a lot of hearing-impaired people would feel less self-conscious if their hearing aids were invisible, yet still functional. Pipe dream, I know... but one can dream.
  • ladberg 6y ago
    Smaller batteries are absolutely VC-backable. If they're developed for any application (phones, cars, power grid) they'll spill over into every other area.
  • stmw 6y ago
    Have you looked at https://www.listenlively.com https://www.listenlively.com or are you talking about something different? (It's VC-backed BTW).
    • Jemaclus 6y ago
      I haven't heard of that, but those hearing aids aren't anything special w/r/t shape or size. They're using the same batteries as other hearing aids. I'm sure they're getting their cost savings somewhere else. See this photo: https://www.listenlively.com/_next/static/images/rechargeable-model-f3a18946e7faf09551b34c1c40c508f8.png.webp https://www.listenlively.com/_next/static/images/rechargeabl... They claim to be "invisible", but what they really mean is that the tube from the aid to the ear is really thin and transparent, and the aid itself is skin-toned. But it's not invisible, anyone can see it, and it's still big! (though light-years smaller than they were in the 90s...) First, a clarification. There are in-the-ear hearing aids and over-the-ear hearing aids. The difference is usually one of power. An in-the-ear hearing aid is usually for older people with minor hearing loss. Someone like me that is profoundly deaf or with a severe hearing loss needs more powerful amplification. More power == more energy, and more energy == bigger batteries. That means that we need an over-the-ear hearing aid, like the one in the image above. The size factor for over-the-ear aids isn't due to design, but rather to the battery. The battery is the biggest part! They're this big: https://helpingmehear.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/hearing-aid-batteries-2.jpg https://helpingmehear.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/hearing... This means the aid cannot be ANY SMALLER than the battery. If we could eliminate the battery entirely and rely on some other energy store, then the size of the aid could be slimmed down to almost flat. The other problem with batteries is that batteries need to be changed when they die. My battery lasts somewhere between 7-9 days before it dies. If we were to use a smaller battery than the image above, it would die even more often. And trust me, it SUCKS to be mid-conversation when a battery dies... and it sucks even more if you didn't have any batteries with you and now you have to run to a local pharmacy to buy some, and you're trying to communicate with a cashier or whatever while completely deaf... Oof... But I digress... :) Anyway! So the dream, as it were, is to create a battery-less aid that can run off body heat or something magical like that.
• jtfairbank 6y ago
  I'm building supply chain & logistics tech at Distribute Aid. We help grassroots aid groups meet more needs, more consistently, and work together to gain efficiency at scale. We deliver $100 worth of aid for every $1 we spend on operations. Literally a 100x return for humanity. The need is there. The scale is there. But it'll never get VC funding for obvious reasons.
  • cambalache 6y ago
    > We deliver $100 worth of aid for every $1 we spend on operations. Literally a 100x return for humanity. This seems awfully high, what does it include?
    • jtfairbank 6y ago
      We leverage partnerships with in-kind donors and shipping companies to get a lot of stuff for free. And of course there are tons of community groups gathering second-hand donations which we can send for free as well. For example, there's a charitable factory making soap in Scotland. They give us a few hundred thousand bars of soap every 6 months or so, and we ship em out to 15+ refugee camps in Greece to ensure the hygiene of 100,000 people are met. Our 2019 budget was $10,000...
• blamestross 6y ago
  Heirloom consumer electronics and computers. Moore's law is failing, and the only reason we keep having to replace electronics is planned obsolescence and the fact electronics are still just designed with replacement expected by momentum. Design laptops and cellphones to last 50 or 100 years plus. Start designing for a long term and mature computer industry.
  • pixelface 6y ago
    there are a number of pieces of electronics that appear to already meet this - high quality (and older) vacuum cleaners, analog audio gear, laboratory equipment, certain kinds of vintage computers. the main issue i run into with repairs tends to be mask roms / asics / gate arrays that are undocumented and long gone from the market. there are ways around that, but they require great effort. it's only in special niches like arcade machines or iconic 80s synths where people will go so far as to decap and image dies in order to get the needed information. there is a particular value an object must have in order to tip the scales in favor of repair over replacement. it simply isn't practical to spend a major portion of a device's cost to repair it unless it is special in some way. i place value on repairing things and buying used but a lot of that is out of a personal feeling of pride in repairing and reusing. board level rework is a far cry from changing ones own oil. on the topic of designing laptops and cell phones to last 50-100 years, you can absolutely make use of communications equipment from 1920-1970. radio teletypes didn't stop working, people still buy and sell them.
  • lachlan-sneff 6y ago
    Moore's law isn't dead yet, we've got quite a ways to go. There are feasible paths to 1cm³ processors with billions of cores and enough processing power to host thousands of humans minds.
    • blamestross 6y ago
      It's not that we can't get faster processors. Moore's law is about the RATE of getting faster processors.
  • pabs3 6y ago
• Jemaclus 6y ago
  Here's my brilliant/crazy idea: drive-thru mass. Wait, wait, don't leave yet. Hear me out. Let's face it. Church is boring. Most of that time on Sunday is consumed with the same old filler material. The choir sings. You stand up, you sit down, you stand up, you raise your hands, you sit down, you kneel, you stand up, you sit down. You sprinkle in hymns in between prayers. There's always The Lord's Prayer, which everyone recites by rote like zombies. The pastor/priest gets up and delivers a sermon/homily that may or may not be interesting. You stand up, sit down, a basket lands in front of you and you drop a few bucks into the donation basket, stand up again, sing another hymn, then sit down. Finally, mercifully, it's time for communion. You wait until the row in front of you has gone, then you stand up and, like a parade of penguins, waddle down the pews until you get to the aisle where line up like lemmings and shuffle forward until you reach your destination. There's a little "this is the body of Christ, this is the blood of Christ", yadda yadda, then you sit down, stand up, sing a hymn, sit down, close your eyes for the final prayer, shake everyone's hands and leave. For Catholics, at least, the important bit is communion, that little 5 minute sliver in the middle of an hour is the most important bit. But hey, I mean, you're a busy person. You want to beat the crowd to the post-church Olive Garden all-you-can-eat buffet or you want to watch the football game that starts at 11:30am on the west coast, and all of that sitting and standing and murmuring along with prayers is cutting into your valuable time! So,... drive-thru mass. You pull up in line. There's a sign at the beginning that says, "Turn your radio to 1530 AM". You turn to the channel -- or maybe you download this week's podcast episode?! -- and it's the priest with today's sermon. He's talking about how the world is a scary place, and the only way to survive is through the grace of God. Yadda yadda. It's a 5-10 minute affair, but that's okay because you're in line for communion! You pull up to the window, and a deacon leans out and says, "The body of Christ", then hands you a cracker. You eat it as you pull forward to the next window. The deacon leans out with a thimble-cup of wine (or grape juice, it's so small, who cares) and says, "The blood of Christ." You knock it back, do the sign of the cross at the Jesus-on-a-cross hanging just past the window, pull forward, drop a few bucks in the donation chute, and then head out on your merry way. Time elapsed: 5-10 minutes. You saved your knees and back, and you got the sermon, the body/bread, the blood/wine, and if you're really feeling it, you listen past the sermon and catch a hymn or two, and beat the crowd for those unlimited breadsticks. Seems like a win/win to me.
• auslegung 6y ago
  For a loose definition of “idea”, find the minimal viable dose of fasting. We’re sure fasting is good for humans but we’re not sure what the sweet spot is. 16 hours every day? 3 days every month? 1 week every year? It’s difficult to convince someone to fund something that can’t be sold. How do you profit by seeking fasting?
  • ambicapter 6y ago
    Sell it as an ebook :D
• benjohnson 6y ago
  Microsoft Access for the web. Plot twist: The underlying framework, database connection system, and model is sane - so that when you get to the point where the walled garden doesn't let you change what you want you can dive into the underlying system to do significant changes.
  • Smoosh 6y ago
    I've always thought that Excel redesigned as a database could be a viable product.
    • EKLM-ZK88 6y ago
      Isn't that what access is?
      • Smoosh 6y ago
        Are you trying to get on my enemies list? ;-) Actually, I wondered if someone would bring up Access. The problem with it is that it is trying to be a "real" database with an accessible interface. I feel it doesn't do either well. It can be very useful, but never simple and easy enough for the target users I'm thinking about.
    • GregOwen 6y ago
      That's what we're building at Sigma (https://www.sigmacomputing.com/ https://www.sigmacomputing.com/)
  • mamcx 6y ago
    I'm in a similar dream, building from scratch a relational language (I wanna not only the UI of Access/excel but the power of FoxPro). The main block is funding. I could do it for life if it pay at least the bills, but how fund it?
  • divyekapoor 6y ago
    See Smartsheets (or Airtable) - they got it right.
• formercoder 6y ago
  The vast, vast majority of businesses are not suitable for VC funding but have the potential to be great.
• minerjoe 6y ago
  How about systems that don't involve stat backed currency OR cryptocurrency? Like using these amazing communication devices to connect needs with resources without involving the middle-man god $.
  • rojeee 6y ago
    I think this is a great idea and economists have been looking at this for nearly a century now, for example, there is Knut Wicksell's "Pure Credit Economy" from 1919 but not much progress has been made. There's a nice paper you can read called "money is memory" which argues that keeping track of past transactions is actually a more effective way of allocating resources than using money/tokens. I've been figuring out how such a system would work in practice. I believe that when we can more effectively and fairly manage reputation in the context of transactions (I'm not advocating some horrid "social credit" system that the Chinese government foisted on the country), then we won't need money anymore. That means no central banks as monopoly issuer of currency and I think the World will be a better place because of it.
• jedberg 6y ago
  This is basically what government is for. For funding things that are good ideas but not profitable.
  • manquer 6y ago
    VC fund a specific type of profitable business, typically high growth potential, quickly scalable and can be protected with barriers of entry, finally should be sellable to someone . There are plenty of profitable businesses which do not fit this model and government is not equipped to invest in.
  • maxharris 6y ago
    The government's actual purpose is the one thing no business can do, which is to use physical force against people that murder, rape, steal, defraud, etc. Businesses can't serve that role because armed businesses fighting with each other would quickly devolve into violent anarchy (and not the stable utopia anarchists claim). Incidentally, 19th-century America had a lot of faults and flaws (it was incredibly racist), but an absolutely unprecedented amount of scientific and industrial progress was made without much public spending at all.
    • sushshshsh 6y ago
      If armed groups are supposed to suddenly wake up and decide to start killing each other to ensure their own survival, why haven't Russia and the USA nuked each other off the face of the earth yet?
      • mongojunction 6y ago
        good question. but I think the answer is obvious when you consider the different risks enormous groups and small groups face from disputes. for small groups nearly every dispute could pose existential risk, but for enormous groups very few disputes pose existential risk. then in the conflict side, enormous groups have MAD, where conflict itself carries existential risk. small groups of course can also be wiped out by conflict (even if they don't possess a bureaucratic mechanism to ensure that,) but the risk side of the calculation is heavier for them I think. and enormous groups still engage in conflict with each other although it happens indirectly via proxy wars. also paradoxically the larger the group becomes the more its interests, or "meta interests" (such as favoring stability and security), tend to align with its competitors but for small groups it's almost like every group for itself. but I believe that the calculation can tend towards cooperation being more beneficial the larger group gets. but I think this factor only applies when groups become very very large. also there's some sort of entropy argument as in large groups cultivate more structure, organization and order and therefore it would take more energy to dismantle them so they're more stable. which not only makes them harder to dismantle but also gives them more to lose if they were to decide to tear everything down and build it up again. that's how I think about it. what do you think?
• badrabbit 6y ago
  Commercialized consumer ready redux-os
• kickout 6y ago
  Paying farmers to sequester carbon
• kickout 6y ago
  Paying farmers to sequester carbon and rebuild soil health in 5 year intervals. $100/acre.
  • mandelbrotwurst 6y ago
    I believe the federal government actually sort of does do this currently, although it's more just that they pay you to not farm the land rather than actively repair it. This was a few years ago, some folks in Missouri told me that they were getting some income this way. I'm ~80% sure it was a federal and not a state or local program, and no idea what it is called.
  • giffarage 6y ago
    this is real. check out Indigo Ag
    • kickout 6y ago
      Late reply, but yes I am aware of Indigo Ag. Will see if they can deliver on their goals. I am dubious
• mchusma 6y ago
  Open source operating system for healthcare (for people to store medical records and diagnosis tools). Medical diagnosis is fundamentally an information problem, which should be both free and open source. But there may be little to no business model here.
  • YokoZar 6y ago
    You may be interested in the Direct project, a set of open standards for secure communication between different healthcare systems: http://wiki.directproject.org/Main_Page http://wiki.directproject.org/Main_Page
  • RocketSyntax 6y ago
    That's a file system and platform. See Databrick's recent work in EHR. It's open source.
  • pabs3 6y ago
    The DebianMed team might have packaged something useful: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMed https://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/ https://blends.debian.org/med/tasks/
• uncheckederror 6y ago
  Open source property tax assessment, admin, and collection software. This space is foundational to the function of local government, but the existing closed-source offerings in this space are expensive, dated, and opaque to the public. This will never be VC backable because the market is small and each local government has special needs and unique requirements. The cost per customer is high and there's a hard cap on the TAM.
  • ciarannolan 6y ago
    Do you mind if I ask how you know about this? Is it an industry you work in/around? I'm always curious how people discover these kinds of business ideas.
    • uncheckederror 6y ago
      In a prior job I was tasked with building a REST API client for a closed source vendor product in this space as part of project to replace an existing system. Data need to be captured from a dozen on-prem databases that supported other vendor applications and then pushed into this new system using the client I built. Sadly, the vendor provided scanned copies of JIRA user-stories as documentation of their app's API. Despite much struggling, the vendor wouldn't implement even the most basic auto-generated documentation for their API (Swagger). Bugs filed against their product regularly had a 3 month turn around time. If there were an open source product in this space I could have forked it, made the changes I needed, submitted a pull request and then escalated it with management to get it mainlined by the vendor. We were their only client for this product and they needed us to implement their system as an example of success so they could make further sales. But their secrecy made good-faith efforts at building integrations with their product extremely difficult. This might have been survivable if the vendor was good at communicating. Alas this project just got delayed for another year after it was discovered by one of my old coworkers that the new system wasn't calculating property taxes correctly. If we had taken the vendor at their word this would have not been discovered and incorrect taxes may have gone out. Nobody loves taxes, but people rightfully hate it when their local government makes preventable mistakes. Open source software in this space would reduce the rate of errors made in these scenarios and allow the public to verify the correctness of the system that taxes their property. As a bonus the cost of developing these systems could be spread across multiple local governments who each employ their own developers, rather than each group struggling through this process on their own once a decade.
• scythe 6y ago
  Seashell-mimetic ceramic-polymer composites: https://escholarship.org/content/qt81h4g1f5/qt81h4g1f5.pdf https://escholarship.org/content/qt81h4g1f5/qt81h4g1f5.pdf On a less quixotic note, electric buses, particularly dual-mode trolleybuses that never stop to refuel. They're slowly appearing but less exciting than electric cars apparently.
• ww520 6y ago
  Second Life with VR, with AI-driven NPC, plus deep-faked faces and bodies of real people (e.g. celebrity). Bonus would be a cybernetics jack-in to have a fully immersed experience. With all the push to remote work, it's not farfetched to do your daily Scrum on a Hawaii beach inside the Second Life VR.
  • ciarannolan 6y ago
    When you launch this, I would recommend not including the phrase "cybernetics jack-in" in your marketing materials.
    • ww520 6y ago
      Isn't jacking-in the term for interfacing the brain to cyberspace via a cybernetic interface jack? Probably it's too obscure a term.
      • ciarannolan 6y ago
        Eh, sorry, I was making a lame joke.
• so33 6y ago
  cities built around transit and biking.
  • kspacewalk2 6y ago
    I think the entire country of the Netherlands is a startup in that market.
• yummypaint 6y ago
  This is only a partially formed idea: Some kind of derivatives market that allows investors to make money speculating on fossil fuel reserves while simultaneously discouraging extraction. The core idea is that fossil fuels are a finite resource nearly irreplaceable at scale whose value will increase with time, but the specifics of what lies where is poorly known, which creates an opportunity for a market to exist. Participating in the market would have to be more profitable than extraction, however. Maybe if the price of securing mineral rights could be guaranteed to be greater than the market value of the resource? It isn't clear how this incentive structure would work. I welcome ideas.
  • eunoia 6y ago
    I like this. It seems like this could also be within the scope of a single fund? The fund would own mineral rights, investors could buy in expecting those rights to appreciate in value over a very long term. I suppose you’d want a few funds with different speculation strategies and then basically end up back at a market though. Also I don’t see how anyone invests without the end goal _eventually_ being extraction.
  • charliepark 6y ago
    You might like reading some thoughts in this direction from Matt Frost: https://mwfrost.com/coal_retirement_plan/ https://mwfrost.com/coal_retirement_plan/ Or a slightly more conversational article on his idea: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/every-climate-concerned-billionaire-should-do-this-to-save-the-world/413020/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/every...
• satvikpendem 6y ago
  Just a note that "bootstrapper VCs" are coming up that fund ideas whose revenue will eventually be in the <100 million dollar range, usually 10 or 20 million. Such examples include TinySeed, Earnest Capital, Indie.vc, Lighter Capital, and others. So this question might have some interesting answers if we take this knowledge into consideration as well, as some of the ideas here could potentially be funded by these VCs even if not by traditional ones.
• peterburkimsher 6y ago
  BeWelcome.org - like CouchSurfing, but without membership fees. Stay in people's houses for free. There's no obligation to be a host (I wasn't for years). The site is made by volunteers, server costs are paid by donation, and there's full financial transparency. Legally the structure is comparable to Wikipedia/Wikimedia, and is a non-profit "association" in France. Why volunteer? I build things because I want to. Sometimes they make it to Show HN. But nobody uses them. I lose motivation when there isn't a colleague asking me to fix things twice a day. Hospitality exchange has the network effect needed to bring in newcomers and get people involved. My dream is that it could be much bigger. Passionate people could start other social networks within the same community: BeBook, BeChat, BeMail. I'd like to build BeTranslate, starting with Chinese/English. At first it would just be partnering with existing open-source projects (like all the CS meetups that are choosing to rename). But it would also be a commitment of these developers to never close their source, never charge fees, and always involve the community.
• mongojunction 6y ago
  a distributed way to map and collect the data structure on the web crowdsourced from a community of people not only passionate about mapping out the structure of app HTML and how it corresponds to data types, but also people who want to collect and use that data. the data can be used for anything from competition and pricing analysis, to dashboards, to creating automatic RSS feeds of anything. it just seems that being able to unlock the late and value of all of the information the structured information on the web which is presented only in a semi-structured form but with the addition of human labor could be so it's machine usable could unlock so much value. but I've been pitching VCS and y combinator on this idea for the last six or seven years and not so much as a peep of interest so it seems that this idea doesn't possess a way to create a lot of money but I do believe it's very valuable.
• fellowniusmonk 6y ago
  Ending involuntary homelessness with facial recognition.
• egypturnash 6y ago
  A free program for doing US taxes that has the polish and SEO of TurboTax. The ultimate successful exit sees the entire sector of “tax service middleman” drying up once you have cut off the revenue of TurboTax and the rest of the tax preparation lobby, so they can no longer keep lobbying the government to have this complicated process instead of just automatically doing your taxes and sending you a bill like every other civilized country. Your company vanishes along with the rest of this sector.
  • sinatra 6y ago
    Isn’t CreditKarma trying a free alternative to TurboTax et al?
    • asperous 6y ago
      Turbotax purchased CreditKarma
      • scarmig 6y ago
        Maybe a good VC play. Build a good alternative to Turbotax et al., force them to acquire you, sleep in bed of money.
      • ummonk 6y ago
        Yup, should obviously be blocked on antitrust grounds but I doubt the current DoJ will do so.
  • atonse 6y ago
    I have always wanted to create a non-profit to do this :) The analogy I used to use is a Robinhood for Taxes, but really now that Robinhood is increasingly seen as a manipulative tool, maybe I don't really want to associate with that brand anymore? (although I'm still a user though)
    • egypturnash 6y ago
      Dennis Moore. https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2nrqgb https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2nrqgb :)
• idrios 6y ago
  Custom solutions for disabled adults and children. Conditions like cerebral palsy, ALS, quadriplegia, etc force otherwise healthy people into isolation. Steven Hawking famously had a custom program that gave him his voice back when he lost it, but how many other people with similar conditions don't have access to that kind of technology. Every person's condition and relevant challenges is different so most solutions probably wouldn't scale.
  • sterlind 6y ago
    When I had bad mobility problems, I wanted to create a rollator that converted into a lightweight power chair for when I was done walking. There are rollator/transport chair hybrids, but those still require a caregiver to push you. In an age of hoverboards and cheap electric scooters, something like this should be doable.
• nthacker 6y ago
  Your site is rad. Here's my idea: P2P grid compute + storage that is actually cheap and can drive down the cost of computation significantly. Can be achieved with unikernels, homomorphic encryption, ipfs. There's a lot of compute and storage available all over the world, idle, waiting to be used. A system like this can utilize it
  • isaacimagine 6y ago
    I've worked on similar things in the past; I think this idea (A distributed compute + storage network) in general, is great. However, although Homomorphic encryption is pretty cool, it's not that fast. AFAIK, current state-of-the art is essentially simulating Boolean gate arrays. If anyone has any insight on the technicanal foundational feasibility of this, please share :)
  • jerryoftheyear 6y ago
    I've got my homelab participating in Folding@Home, it'd be interesting to run some commercial workloads in a similar manner to help offset energy costs.
• betocmn 6y ago
  I already purchase several personal care products from Thankyou [1]. I would love to see their model expanded to many other categories, perhaps an entire supermarket with only such brands. Edit: Fixed link [1] https://thankyou.co/about https://thankyou.co/about
• andrewnc 6y ago
  Some sort of meme engine for scientific content. We're fighting a huge war of misinformation and the current method of nice graphs and we'll constructed prose is failing[0]. So we need to use much of the same tactics used by misinformation groups to spread facts. [0] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6498/1405 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6498/1405
• Balgair 6y ago
  Be nice to upgrade democracy to git. Not, like in theory, but for real. New law? Push the update. Pull old law easy peasy. diff/grep on newer versions or the county's over. Vote on what makes it to prod, sub-teams for smaller areas like parking tickets, etc. Yeah, it's simple at the end, but digitizing it all, linking it to the underlying databases, root privileges, etc. would make it all run much smoother. Be nice to see people get involved more too.
  • eob 6y ago
    You might enjoy reading about Taiwan’s experiments in this direction [1]. They’ve used an online system to craft 26 pieces of legislation now with public participation. Now quite full-on “governance by git” but a very cool step in that direction. Pretty sure it’s one of Audrey Tang’s projects [2]. She’s a member of the cabinet who is also an all-around hacker. [1] https://congress.crowd.law/case-vtaiwan.html https://congress.crowd.law/case-vtaiwan.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang
  • allenleein 6y ago
    Very interesting. How about upgrade knowledge to git? People iterate knowledge together in a git-based knowledge base network. Upload your own knowledge base, wiki to the network. Push/pull -> new thoughts, breakthroughs... Merge -> different knowledge branch Then build a search engine on top of it.
    • Balgair 6y ago
      Jesus, that would make research papers easier. Historiography via pull requests and push comments? Yes!
  • rajacombinator 6y ago
    git blame would be a fun one here. of course, they’d never let you see the real commit history.
  • TacoSteemers 6y ago
    You might enjoy this article. "How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request Washington DC has made GitHub the authoritative digital source for DC laws." https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/how-i-changed-the-law-with-a-github-pull-request/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/how-i-changed-th...
• allenleein 6y ago
  A Git-powered Knowledge Network. Goal: Empowers humans to explore and iterate knowledge faster Features: - Upload your own knowledge base, wiki to join the network - Search network-based knowledge - 'Clone' a knowledge branch - Edit on it then 'Push' it back to the network - The branch owner / other users can choose to 'Pull' the update to their branch - 'Merge' different knowledge branch Steps: 1. Build a search engine for network-driven knowledge 2. The users iterate knowledge with other knowledge branch owners in the network 3. Build an efficient machine learning data pipeline on top of the structured knowledge input & output system 4. Use the unique data to train the customizable personal knowledge AI
  • anilgulecha 6y ago
    I'm working on a branching/merging authoring framework and application. Git, specifically, is bad as a backing store - as merge conflict resolution is not something you want end users to do - it's not friendly. p2p sync (OT/CRDT) is what I'm betting and building on. If anyone is interested in this space, I'd like to discuss/geek-out on this with you. Please reach out.
    • allenleein 6y ago
      Great points, will reach out soon :)
    • billconan 6y ago
      any good tutorial on implementing crdt? Most of them are for plain text. How to implement crdt for structured data?
      • anilgulecha 6y ago
        Looks at yjs - it's probably the project that's furthest along here.
  • prerok 6y ago
    I don't understand how this is different from a wiki. I think that wikipedia already contains the collective knowledge from a vast amount of people and, dare I say it, is already the knowledge base of humanity. Can you explain a bit more what the difference is?
• fractallyte 6y ago
  OK, here's something big and way out there: A global power station that taps 'natural' electricity in the ionosphere. Unlimited free power, already in the form we need. No emissions, no need for mining or damming or drilling. And the term 'aurora power' has a really nice ring to it. In more detail: a few days ago on HN there was an article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580362 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23580362) about the risks of solar storms and EMPs on America's power infrastructure. Solar storms induce potentially huge electrical currents in the power grid. Rather than regarding it as a danger, why not find a way to harness it? The Amateur Scientist column in Scientific American had a lovely article about electrostatic motors, powered by the Earth's electric field: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-amateur-scientist-1974-10/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-amateur-scien... (Search for the article title, there's a PDF available elsewhere on internet) The SF writer Murray Leinster made extensive use of ionospheric electricity in many of his novellas... This is a civilization-changer. Like I said, big.
• captn3m0 6y ago
  SaaS businesses that are priced by usage. Pricing by subscription ($x/month) or by users ($x/user/month) is much more easier, more predictable, but makes these unattainable for a large chunk of the global market. VC funding means revenue optimization, which leads to either of the above 2 revenue models (or some variation thereof). Charging your customers like how tarsnap charges its users means you won't ever make a lot of money, but it can be a sustainable business.
• reilly3000 6y ago
  Tell me which laws apply to me, here and now, by which regulators.
• edanm 6y ago
  VCs are not the only game in town, so don't let their needs limit your imagination! It's important to understand that while tech-obsessed founders, like most of the people found in Hacker News, usually think of tech-startups and VC being almost synonymous with entrepreneurship, that's not at all true. Lots of people all around the world consider themselves (and are!) entrepreneurs, without necessarily building innovative tech or seeking VC-like growth prospects. E.g. the corner restaurant you ate at last week? Opened by an entrepreneur. That barbershop that cut your hair? Same. Even much bigger ideas fit in this category - the software that runs the local gym? Possibly a VC-backed startup, but also possibly just a relatively small company focused on a small market, not aiming for sky-high valuations but quietly churning out millions in income. These kinds of businesses have existed for long before VCs, and it's entirely possible to get funding for them the "traditional" way, e.g. raising a friends-and-family round, getting money from a bank, self-financing, charging customers from day one, etc.
• tartoran 6y ago
  Anti police brutality but also anticrime body cam always on recording in overwrite daily loop mode. Live streaming, a plus